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Darren Jorgensen
about his writing in terms that aren’t Jamesonian, the range of his project
transforming Marxist literary criticism into a totality.
Thus it is that in Archaeologies Jameson addresses the disputed ter-
rain of the utopian imagination, and more particularly the anti-utopian situa-
tion of our own times, a situation that leads him to argue for an “anti-anti-
Utopianism.” 5 If there is a precedent for this manoeuvre it is Lukács, whose
shifting positions were constantly negotiating with the hard line Soviet left in
his native Hungary. Those things that many readers find repugnant in
Lukács, including the appeal to a popular front position and the unveiling of
the cognitive processes of capitalism in more and more areas of cultural
life, Jameson has turned on his own historical situation. The rhetorical use
of “we” in both Lukács and Jameson is exemplary of their unitary projects,
the reference to some imagined unity beyond the fragmentations of capital-
ism serving to build an alliance not only between themselves and their
readership, but also within the fragmented array of subject matter they treat
in their writings. From a utopian point of view, the “we” is an invitation to
collaborate with the author in building a shared platform from which a better
world might be glimpsed. From the other side of the utopian barrier – from
the point at which the contradictions of capitalism have resolved them-
selves – these contradictions assume their place in the struggle for social
change, and even become a necessary part of the renewed struggle for to-
tality. This is the temptation that Archaeologies offers to its reader, not only
as a work that oversees the history of work on utopias, but as a kind of
summary of Jameson’s own oeuvre, offering a fundamental and faithful key
with which to unlock his interpretive practice. As Perry Anderson notes, “No
intellectual thread has been more continuous in his work” than utopianism,
and it tempting to think of Archaeologies as the work of a major theoretical
figure who has at last put his methodology on the table. 6
To visualise Jameson’s utopianism, it is necessary to take a step back.
Some of the best critiques of Marxism, after all, have come from beyond
Marxism. Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida’s respective works
on the libidinal and spectral qualities of Marxism are exemplary, subjecting
it to a critique from beyond the popular front. 7 It is without such ambition
that I want to proceed here, but instead I want to begin to unravel some of
Jameson’s utopian project by interrogating its methodology. Many contem-
porary readers will be familiar with Jameson’s Postmodernism: The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), a book whose long influence has been due
to its making sense out of a diverse array of cultural practices. 8 The meth-
odology at work here was called “cognitive mapping,” an experimental yok-
ing together of texts that would render insights into the unconscious of their
historical moment. 9 Archaeologies, however, harks back to an earlier theo-
░ Anti-Utopianism and Jameson’s Archaeologies 47
yet politics is the very terrain that Jameson stakes out for metacommen-
tary, the revolutionary imperative shared by utopian and anti-utopian Marx-
ists alike. For West, it is not only the form of utopianism that is at fault, it is
also Jameson’s choice of critical object, this being a history of philosophy
and a bourgeois literature that is a poor substitute for actual history.
Jameson’s attraction to an immaterial history of philosophy, whether in
Hegel, Marx, poststructuralism, or in the novels of Balzac, Gissing and
Conrad, are for West seductions to be resisted. In adopting formalist strat-
egies Jameson is “breathing life” back into old, bourgeois texts. 24 Eagleton
echoes this critique of Jameson’s lack of praxis, arguing that the working
class movement is missing from The Political Unconscious. 25 For Eagleton,
Jameson’s style compensates for a utopian future that cannot yet be real-
ised. “Jameson’s style displays an intriguing ambivalence of commentary
and critique,” Eagleton writes, and “this springs from a similarly ambivalent
relation to bourgeois culture, at once over-appropriative and over-
generous.” 26 For Eagleton this is symptomatic of a Hegelian Marxism that
subordinates the political to aesthetics. 27
Jameson explicitly addresses the ambivalence of the utopian subject
in Archaeologies, as he turns through the book from antinomies of personal
and collective wish-fulfillment; to fancy and the architectonic imagination; to
the hobbyist and dictator; to finally arrive at the difference between the
Freudian subject and a Marxist equivalent. The ambivalence here lies in
the irreconcilability of these antinomies, which are in fact one and the same
– the chasm between one person’s vision of utopia and another’s reproduc-
ing itself over and over again. For Jameson this distance between the
dreamer and the dream is an invariable part of the utopian. For Marx and
Engels of The Communist Manifesto, such distance is a part of the utopian
malaise. West and Eagleton are similarly interested in returning to an older
Marxist class criticism so as to think utopia as part of the deterioration of
bourgeois culture. For these anti-utopian Marxists, Jameson’s declaration
of an anti-anti-utopianism only adds to the mystique of aesthetic culture, its
ambivalent subject symptomatic of the very problems it purports to solve.
This is nowhere more evident than in the chapters on incommensurable
worlds. Addressing the impossibility of thinking about a utopia that lies be-
yond the barrier of massive social change, Jameson turns to science fic-
tion. Example upon example of the obstacles put before utopia are taken
from Le Guin, John Brunner, Isaac Asimov and Lem, pointing as if directly
to the difficulty of social change. Jonathan Swift’s utopian Houyhnhnms are
perhaps the most extreme case described here, their utopianism constitu-
tionally unavailable as horses rather than people achieve the peaceable
life. 28 The doubled function of such descriptions of a utopia that lies un-
52 Darren Jorgensen ░
point of the interest of the status quo,” he writes, “the real abolition of cul-
ture must appear utopian.” 31 Utopia is that transformation of the libidinal will
to affirm life into an appearance of affirmation, into affirmative culture as
such.
It is in this sense too that the metacommentary, in which interpretation
after interpretation aspires to a totalising vision of the conditions for inter-
pretation itself, is not necessarily a revolutionary mode of thought. This is
because the anti-anti-utopian position is for the radical Nietzchean or mate-
rialist Marxist the reactionary affirmation of a terrain already staked out by a
culture of illusion. This is a culture in which differences are only ever partial
from each other, while what Marcuse recognised in Nietzsche was the
revolutionary affirmation of the absolute. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Tril-
ogy (1992-1996), featured throughout Archaeologies, illuminates the rela-
tions between these differences and affirmations. 32 In the first two books
the new Martian colonists pursue their utopian fantasies for the planet in
spite of each other, in activities that often place them in conflict with each
others’ interests and in dispute with Earth. The relations of force at work in
the multiplicity of communitarian and ecological projects describe the het-
erogeneities of Nietzsche’s famous will to power. In their differences, “ac-
tive forces affirm, and affirm their difference: in them affirmation is first, and
negation is never but a consequence, a sort of surplus of pleasure.” 33 Life
in these terms is not so much critical of other life, not a limit for another’s
pleasure, but is in a relation of quality. This is the life pursued by Robin-
son’s early colonists on Mars, whose activities, from seeding Mars with in-
vented life to creating new modes of architecture and sport, are both uto-
pian and in a state of discord. The endless schemes thought up by these
characters for the future are proximate to immediacy, as they turn to praxis
on the planetary surface. As Gilles Deleuze writes of Nietzsche, “Modes of
life inspire ways of thinking; modes of thinking create ways of living. Life ac-
tivates thought, and thought in turn affirms life.” 34 By the third book all this
activity has descended into a dull constitutionalism, conflict turning into fac-
tions that submit to the need implicit in the totality of the planet to work to-
gether rather than independently. Those original schemers and anarchists
of the first two books turn into the utopian tinkerers for whom Jameson re-
serves a certain sympathy in Archaeologies, their situation in life castrated
by the supremacy of reason and governance. The older colonists look in-
stead to the new colonists on Venus who are living the dream as they once
did, utopianism always at the frontier, asserting an absolute rather than a
relative difference. The victory of reactive forces on Mars is analogous to
the submission of human life on Earth to capital, to which utopia stands
now as a mirage that once was, or that can only be contemplated seriously
54 Darren Jorgensen ░
in youth. It is for this reason that Marcuse writes of the appearance of uto-
pia rather than of utopia itself, and of a negation that is only ever contin-
gent.
If Marcuse arrives at this distinction in a dialectic between Nietzsche
and Marx, while Jameson’s Archaeologies constitutes itself in an antinomy
between Marx and Freud, it remains to think through the utopianism of
Nietzsche and Freud, whose combination may well rephrase the problem.
In the latter part of Archaeologies Jameson describes these unresolvable
contraries in terms of a break between utopia and the historical world, nam-
ing that uncrossable chasm by which utopia becomes a critical negation.
After an era of revolutions, it is not so much Marx but Nietzsche and Freud
who are able to make sense of the failures of these revolutions. For both of
these writers attempted to think through the retreat from the abyss of total
transformation in their theorisation of a civilisation that repeated its own
sameness. They named this repetition nihilism and narcissism respectively,
both anti-utopian tendencies that restrain the possibilities of the present.
For Nietzsche the psyche’s descent into everyday nihilism was one half of
the eternal return of the same, the other facing transformation with a leap
into an awakened consciousness, only to return once more to the forgetting
that condemns the everyday. In Freud’s writing, the death drive keeps civi-
lisation bound to its repetition of the same, its narcissistic repetition mani-
festing an anti-utopian materialism of the living body that nevertheless
wants to return to its unliving state of matter. 35
The pessimism of Nietzsche and Freud stands in stark contrast to
Marx’s own materialisms, which find instead that the human relation to mat-
ter is rich with the possibility of a certain liberation. Marcuse’s appropriation
of Nietzsche is similarly enriched by revolutionary ideas. Ignoring the indi-
viduated nature of the eternal return, Marcuse turns instead to this philoso-
pher’s earlier writings that critique the social order from which he eventually
withdrew. On the other hand, Jameson side-steps the pessimism of the
later Freud, who after witnessing the devastation of a modern war would re-
inscribe his youthful model of wish-fulfilment into the pessimism of the
death drive. 36 Such is the nature of dialectical Marxism to appropriate the
most optimistic of ideas with a view to social change. This, then, would rep-
resent the boundaries of a utopian thought that cannot assimilate the inevi-
tability of human despair and unhappiness in the organisation of its socie-
ties. The later writings of Nietzsche and Freud, however, may well share
more with the Jameson of Archaeologies than with the Marxist anti-
utopians. Nietzsche, Freud and Jameson looked upon utopia from a great-
er and greater distance as their lives went on, the island of happiness re-
ceding from view. From the positivity of his call for interpretation in the “Me-
░ Anti-Utopianism and Jameson’s Archaeologies 55
NOTES
1
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005).
2
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Li-
terature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971).
3
Ehrhard Bahr, “Review of Marxism and Form”, Comparative Literature Studies,
12.2 (June 1975), pp. 180-2.
4
Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion”, in Aesthetics and Politics (London:
Verso, 1980), pp. 196-213.
5
Jameson, Archaeologies, p. xvi.
6
Perry Anderson, “The River of Time”, New Left Review, 26 (March-April 2004), p.
67.
7
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Blooming-
56 Darren Jorgensen ░
ton: Indiana University Press, 1993); Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The
State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy
Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
8
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991).
9
Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 51. The original methodological outline of cognitive
mapping is to be found in Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping”, ed. Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 247-57.
10
Fredric Jameson, “Metacommentary” (1971) in Ideologies of Theory. Essays
1971-1986. Volume 1: Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988), pp. 3-16.
11
Jameson, Marxism and Form; Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language:
A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1972); Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis,
the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Fredric
Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981).
12
Jameson, Postmodernism; Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1994); Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1990); Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and
Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
13
Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (Lon-
don: Verso, 1990); Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 2000);
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
(London: Verso, 2002).
14
It was The Political Unconscious that led Terry Eagleton to famously claim Jame-
son to be the “foremost American Marxist critic” in “The Idealism of American Criti-
cism”, New Left Review, 127 (May-June 1981), p. 60. If a survey of references in
the PMLA is anything to go by, Jameson’s was the most influential work of Ameri-
can criticism in the 1980s. John W. Kronik’s survey of 235 articles that appeared in
PMLA between 1981 and 1990 found that, after references to Roland Barthes,
Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson was the
most cited author. Half of these references were to The Political Unconscious. See
John W. Kronik, “Editorial”, MLA Newsletter (Winter 1991).
15
See Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Frank Lentriccha, After the New Criticism
(London: Althone, 1980); Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class?: The Authority
of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Hayden
White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Edward Said, Orientalism (New
York: Pantheon, 1978); and Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Lon-
don: Metheun, 1976).
16
Jameson, “Metacommentary”, p. 4.
17
Jameson’s summary of Christopher Kendrick’s essay is significant here. See
░ Anti-Utopianism and Jameson’s Archaeologies 57